Submitted by Dr.Kattlove’s Cancer Blog

Yes we can! If you read these blogs very often, you will have learned that my experience as a practicing oncologist taught me that the old phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is doubly true when it comes to cancer. Stopping smoking, eating properly, keeping slim, can lower our cancer rate by as much as one-half.

Now doctors from Japan have come up with a way for blocking our chances of getting stomach cancer. It may surprise you to know that some infections can cause cancer. We know, for example, that infections with the HSV virus cause cancer of the cervix and sometimes of the mouth. Infections with hepatitis B or C viruses can lead to liver cancer. And, stomach cancer is usually seen in people infected with the bacteria called h. pylori.

Preventing stomach cancer has not interested U.S. researchers because it seems to be slowly disappearing from our country. Since 1975 the rate of Americans getting this cancer has dropped by 40%. But still it hits about 20,000 people a year and about 10,000 die from this cancer. So anything we can do to prevent this cancer and the deaths would be worthwhile.

Many countries have a much higher rate of stomach cancer. Many of them are in South America and Asia. Japan has always had a rate of this cancer, very much higher than the U.S. For that reason, Japanese doctors screen patients for this cancer and often catch them early. In fact they often catch the cancers so early that they don’t have to remove the stomach to treat them. Instead they can just cut out the tumor and leave the stomach intact.

But there is a problem with this approach. A new cancer can develop in the stomach after the first cancer has been removed. Researchers from Japan wondered if they could prevent this by giving patients antibiotics to knock out the h. pylori infection. They studied 544 patients who had cancers removed without losing much of their stomach. Half (272) were given h. pylori-killing antibiotics and half were not. The whole group was watched for the development of new cancers. At the end of 3 years, 24 patients out of the 272 who did not receive antibiotics developed a new cancer while in those who got the drugs, only 9 did. That means a reduction in new stomach cancers of over 60%.

The big question for the world and us is whether all of us should get these antibiotics. Perhaps the reason the rate of stomach cancer in the U.S. is dropping is that most of us may have received antibiotics often enough during out highly overmedicated lives that we may have killed off any h. pylori infection.

But, in countries like Japan where stomach cancer is a bigger problem, it is something to think about.

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